How to get better insights and build the brand by online discussions

Being a brand manager or product developer, the online realm may seem to be your oyster; typing some keywords in a search engine can result in an apparently endless array of forum posts, tweets and blog entries, raving, gossiping or complaining about your brand. But be careful of what you are paying attention to, because you might end up listening to the wrong voices.

As a few researchers pointed out lately, the anonymous masses of the Web 2.0 sphere started to move from a cooperative, positive attitude to malicious criticism, going as far as ’cyber-mobbing’ brand activities just for the sake of irreverent pleasure. Obviously, this is not a general rule, but it is indeed a risk that you are facing when using such source of information.

You might wonder: isn’t it enough then to turn to your brand’s social media page and start a conversation with your followers? It seems to be an easy and tempting option to establish a more ‘personal’ type of online research, but it might still not be satisfactory in every aspect.

Initiatives like Frito-Lay’s recent co-creation activity conducted on their Facebook page might be an interesting tool for getting some buzz and awakening creative spirit in your most enthusiastic followers, but there is a high chance that your consumers merely interpret it as ‘another fun Facebook game’. Hearing back thorough thoughts and sincere responses? Not likely, because consumers would need time and intimacy for that, after they established a mutual trust with researchers and the brand itself that helps them open up.

Good news is you don’t have to turn away from online platforms being utterly disillusioned by faceless virtual masses.

Social media research software, like online consumer community platforms, make it possible to handpick the segments that are truly relevant for your brand.

Respondents will have a ‘face’, yet only those who fit certain criteria can contribute to the talk, ensuring that you keep listening to the right voices. Instead of dealing with an anonymous mass, people can give you a glimpse into their lives, providing the opportunity to ask better questions by knowing them better over time.

Ray Poynter famously used the allegory of communities offering the comfort of a ‘long time relationship’ where partners have time to discuss issues in an open, proactive, caring way, versus ad hoc research sessions and surveys that are seen as a rushed ‘one night stand’. Long-term communities have the same pleasant benefits but also offer more value.

For instance, interaction sparks between users by commenting on each other’s posts and creating an engaging dialogue just like it would happen in a brainstorming session. What sets ‘co-creating’ in online communities apart from live sessions is the psychological advantage of consumers logging in from their homes.

They are not forced to come up with the ‘Big Idea’ cramped into a fieldwork room, suffering from time and peer pressure. In fact, they have the opportunity to digest the issue over time, look up inspiring examples from external sources (like fashion blogs, international magazines, Instagram, Pinterest or other visually driven social media sites) and ask for friends’ opinion.

Not to mention another great benefit: experienced community managers are always on hand, ensuring that the discussion remains active and stays on track, digging into as deep as possible.

Knowing that the brand is truly listening to them, consumers will get involved in the ideation process in a more personal way, which likely results in being more proactive, giving thorough answers and engaging themselves to take part in the brand’s development instead of eroding it by trolling on a public forum.

In fact, the online world can indeed be your oyster, but you had better turn to experts to get that pearl out of the shell.

Zsofia Kerekes is a Senior Research Executive specialising in online research communities for FMCG, media and technology brands

The first email I looked at this morning literally woke me up. I mean, I thought I was already awake, but the contents of this email really WOKE ME UP! I hope it’ll set the tone for the rest of my day. The contents of this email – a presentation – filled me with excitement, gave me a sense of relief and the feeling that we are finally turning the corner in this digital age.

The presentation in question is truly a work of art; as insightful as it is beautiful. I’ll let the presentation do the rest of the talking, and sign off by thanking the author, Martin Weigel of Weiden & Kennedy, for giving me solace, hope and a big fat smile! The presentation is called How to Fail – The Golden Drum, check it out.

Martin is also well worth a follow @mweigel

Some great new research has come to light which shows direct correlation between consumer co-creation and purchasing behaviour.

Ed Malthouse, Research Director at IMC Spiegel Research Initiatives, Northwestern University in the US, together with Su Jung Kim and Mark Vandenbosch took a look at data from Canada’s LoyaltyOne Air Miles program and concluded that when consumers are engaged in co-creation contests that ‘evoke positive expressions and involve active customer-creation such as submitting a photo or video’, they are more likely to purchase in both the short and long term. Furthermore, they found that when consumers are actively involved in the co-creation of some form of benefit, they will value more and consider it for longer that if it was presented to them.

At Dub we’ve known for some time the value in involving consumers directly in the research and product development process from the word go. Speed to market, reduced risk and costs are all in their, now happily joined by sales uplift!

Click this link to read more. To find out how Dub can help you co-create with your customers, contact Stephen Cribbett by emailing stephen@dubishere.com or calling +44 (0) 20 72457 3327

At Dub we’ve been updating the help and support documents we provide our clients when planning to run online qual research aand projects and research communities, and wanted to share some of our thinking with you.

We are always improving our online qual and research community platform, IdeaStream, but without well written task and exercises, the technology is deemed redundant! So, below you’ll find some useful hints and tips for improving participation and ultimately, the quality of your primary research by way of task and exercise design.

• It is vital that your tasks are clear and focused. Try to cover just one primary area of investigation with each task.
• Demonstrate an understanding of your participants world by using their language, not your own. One way to discover the language they use is to listen in on their conversation in the wider web.
• It’s always a good idea to get a colleague not directly involved in the research to read through the task. If they get confused or can’t extract the direction you intend, consider a fresh start or some tweaking.
• Use probes to your advantage. For example, create a task around a single primary question, then retain all the follow up questions and use them as probes.
• The best responses come when you talk in the first person. This humanises proceedings and helps build a relationship between the participant and Moderator/Community Manager
• Give participants the low-down (context) on why you are setting the task or asking the question. Being open and honest in this way goes a long way to seeing participants mirror this openness in their response
• Including directions, in the form of bullet-point lists, can be really useful to participants and is easy to digest. They allow you to provide structure and a clear guide of what you are looking to understand and what is required
• Don’t forget to spell out to participants what you would like to see in their response. Typically this includes suggesting media formats you wish to capture such as video or pictures
• Encourage social interaction whenever and wherever possible, you’ll see great results and collaborative thinking and problem-solving as a result
• Adding supporting media (stimulus) to your tasks and exercises brings them to life and gets the message across much more effectively. Even better, use your webcam to record yourself asking the question (you can of course paraphrase). This has been proven as an effective way of increasing the quality of participation.

For help designing effective online qual research, contact Tom Watts by emailing tom@dubishere.com

At Dub, we help our global clients (brands and agencies) create private, invite-only online communities for the purpose of delivering game-changing insights, collaborative innovation and co-creation. This means helping bring together a brand and its customers, but also those who aren’t yet consuming their products or services, or those that actively don’t want to. These are often referred to as outliers or abstainers, and they are the people who can deliver the best ideas and the richest insights.

The insight communities we help create can be categorised as either Project-based or Longitudinal.

1. Project-based Insight Communities

As the name suggests, these communities are short-lived; typically a couple of days up to a a few weeks. They are tasked to meet a single project objective (research, insight or co-creation) and once this has been achieved, they are quickly disbanded.

Being focused on a single objective means that activity is over a shorter period but is likely to be intensive. Members of the community are likely be assigned exercises on a daily basis, and these can range from blogging, keeping diaries, roleplaying, group discussions, surveys and polls, and brainstorms. Unlike traditional research techniques, members have a much clearer idea as to what is happening with the information and ideas they share since the asynchronous nature of the engagement affords the Community Manager / Moderator the time to feedback. This in itself motivates participation.

In support of project-based insight communities, Dub has the leading platform called IdeaStream

2. Longitudinal Insight Communities

Brands like the opportunity longitudinal insight communities afford, since it’s like getting a large number of their most valued customers together in a room and making them available to answer any questions anyone in the organisation has at any time, 24/7.

Because of the longer-term nature of these communities, different tactics and resources need to be deployed to keep them alive and active. This includes going behind just the task-based level of interaction seen in the project-based communities, and allowing members to go off-piste and start their own discussions. The community (and insight) will also benefit from letting members strike-up their own relationships, as it allows the brand to witness their customers talking about their products and services in the most natural, unfacilitated fashion.

To help you deliver successful longitudinal insight communities, Dub has developed the UpClose platform.

In addition to providing the best technology, Dub has a wealth of experience in how to find the right people for your community, how to engage and optimise your time with them, and how to ensure your members are motivated and rewarded over time. Dub can help you plan how long your community should be and give you guidance on how to deliver design effective online research.

To find out more about how Dub can help you fire-up your insight communities, make better decisions and be more innovative, contact stephen@dubishere.com

As MROCs (or insight communities) continue to gather pace and mature as a methodology, so to does the way in which they are measured and the techniques used to manage them.

We’ve long been touting the benefits of small but focused communities where membership numbers are no more than 300. That’s not to say you can’t invite more people, but the quality of the participation and output will fall as you go much beyond these numbers, as will the time and cost of managing the community and analysing the output.

While there are still researchers and research departments that use the language of ‘completes’ when referring to the success of their insight community, we always push back and talk to them about ‘engagement’ and how you can get much greater value from a smaller number of participants, both in terms of their overall participation with the tasks and exercises but also their average number of contributions.

This metric becomes even more prevalent when you start to consider moving your insight community into a phase of co-creation where you are looking to collaborate with the leading 1% of your customer base.

Another reason why your community needs to be smaller in size and more focused is that consumers are now members of more networks and groups than ever before. To cut through the white noise is thus increasingly difficult, and puts more emphasis in the design of engaging, creative research and the need to make the intrinsic motivational factors (membership, connectivity etc) work even harder.

To find out more about how Dub can help you engage the top 1% of your customer base and build thriving communities for insight, innovation and cocreation, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

We’ve built and facilitated over a hundred online communities purposed with delivering fresh insight, eureka moments and relationships, and we’re constantly impressed by the energy, enthusiasm and creativity extolled by consumers. Not only does the convenience of these methods facilitate better results (than traditional research techniques), it brings out the creative best in people since the rewards and value is a combination of the emotional, social, physical and financial.

We talk to our clients about the merits of ‘narrative journeys’; the creation of a beginning, a middle and an end to the story that results in co-created value. Give consumers room to manoeuvre and a multitude of ways in which they can express themselves, and combine this with the ability to continually iterate the exercises and you’ve got a melting pot of insight and ideas.

The most successful insight and co-creation communities are those that are led by skilled Community Managers – a new breed of research moderators. Community Managers are story tellers, conversationalists and relationship brokers, and they display bags of passion in order to inject enthusiasm and energy into the community. It’s a fun and interesting role that many researchers new to the discipline and quickly falling in love with as they really get to ‘know’ their community as people they are and not just as ‘respondents’.

One strategic intent of your insight and co-creation community should be to fish out the top 1%. These can be your leading advocates, the most creative, the most digitally connected etc. Finding them is critical, and this is where we move from research into co-creation. We must drop the argument about bias and representation and look further forward. As researchers we need to be part of the creation process as well as helping clients understand what went before.

Create the right environment within your community and the ideas and insights will flow, rapidly! Build relationships and your community will be engaged and motivated to co-develop new ideas without the need to financially motivate them. Listen carefully, talk clearly and remain open, honest and transparent and you’ll do well. Goodbye focus groups, hello future. It’s a brave new world we are entering into as researchers, but the future looks bright. Our skills and craft are not lost, they are developing and increasing in relevance.

It’s a given that within online qualitative research (blogs, video diaries, forums, chat, etc), researchers get the opportunity to hear consumers talk about their experiences and their feelings towards products brands and services, but is the dialogue ‘real’ enough?

John Suler’s ‘The Psychology of Cyberspace’ says:

“It’s well known that people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily say or do in the face-to-face world. They loosen up, feel more uninhibited, express themselves more openly. Researchers call this the “disinhibition effect.”

Perhaps the pinnacle of any online research community or ad-hoc online qual study, however, is when, as a researcher, you get to sit back and hear consumers talk among themselves about brands, products and their experiences.

Why is this so powerful? Simply, it provides some of the most candid and unadulterated insight one will ever experience since, as far as the participant is concerned, neither the researcher nor the client (brand) is in the same room and, as John Suller says:

“According to traditional Internet philosophy, everyone is an equal: Peers share ideas and resources. In fact, the net itself is engineered with no centralized control. As it grows, with a seemingly endless potential for creating new environments, many people see themselves as independent-minded explorers. This atmosphere and philosophy contribute to the minimizing of authority.”

These phenomenon and the platforms set a scenario where consumers can literally spew the good, the bad and the ugly without fear of reprisal, backlash or judgment and without the peer pressure associated with real physical presence. For the researcher and the client, it provides an opportunity to hear first-hand the language and experience the passion and gusto consumers use to share their points of view. It delivers truths that are hard to come by elsewhere, in such fashion.

If you’re asking yourself what online research communities can do for you, this should be somewhere near the top of the list.